Greetings and salutations! I hope your week has gone well and you’re sliding into today with enthusiasm and good cheer.

These Days

My week has gone … okay.

I’m back working full time – that is, I’m delivering to all the addresses on my route. I’m wearing a knee brace and a back brace and I’m doing exercises at home to strengthen the parts of me that would prefer it if I just stayed home and spent my time drawing. I will be appealing my Workman’s Comp denial but to do that I’ve got to get one or both of my doctors to provide a medical diagnosis and write an essay about how my accident resulted in my injury. Bleah.

Every day starts with me checking the board to see which routes are being broken up for overtime delivery. Those route will have available vehicles. The vehicle assigned to my route has been gone for over two months now. At this point I’m guessing my route won’t have a vehicle until they start rolling out the new models in 2023.

Mail itself has been light, at least compared to that in the Fall and Christmas season. I’ve been delivering to addresses that I barely seen in the last two months. On Tuesday I pulled backed up mail out of a few mailboxes belonging to vacant addresses. The boxes have “Vacant” cards in them but some carriers just deliver mail to them anyway and the cards get buried. So more mail gets put in.

I’m saying hello to customers I haven’t seen since 2021. They’ve all been happy to see me. I’m sure they’re also happy to be getting their mail before sundown. I’ve heard stories of mail being delivered at seven, eight or later.

My knee continues to object to be active but, fortunately, the objection doesn’t get worse as the day goes on. Neither is it worse after a night of sleep. I’m walking my route, not striding.

One of the benefits on being back at the job is that I’m more focussed about my time otherwise. I’m spending less time scrolling the net, more time drawing or wrting.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF is of an illustration of some werewolves and a badger playing poker. I’m sure it happens all the time.

The design is available on a mug in my Zazzle store.

The design is available on all kinds of schtuff in my Redbubble store.

Coming Attractions

I am often working on multiple designs/illustrations/ cartoons simultaneously. I like to be ahead of schedule. I use different tools for different effects so I will move from drawing to drawing using one brush or pen. When I ran out of 11×17 bristol board I concentrated on building up a backlog of concept sketches.  These were done on 8,5×11 cardstock. These sketches get converted to bluelines in Photoshop, blown up to fit the larger bristol board and then printed out. Most of the time I will ink directly on the blueline. Sometimes I want a more detailed illustration or I have a lot of corrections. In that case I do a pencil drawing over the blueline, rescan it, make a new blueline and print out that version for inking.

Here are a few of the images I’ve got lined up.

That’s it for this week.

Take care of yourself. Eat right and eat well. Enjoy yourself when you can.

Cheers!